Looking through the list I wonder how many of these patents have been contested and/or how many of these patent applications should be rejected. For instance, under the "Web Browser Federated Sign-On Protocol" Microsoft lists patent applications 2005-0223217-A1 and 2006-0112422-A1. There exists prior art for 2005-0223217-A1 claim 14 and further in A-Select and I think for the rest of the claims in Shibboleth. I would have to study 2006-0112422-A1 more in detail, but it looks like about half of the claims there also have prior art in those systems.
'have no more right to demand that others provide for their needs than I, as a diabetic, have a right to demand that sugar no longer be used.' A diabetic is protected because the law requires that foods are adequately labeled so he has sufficient information available to choose to buy a product. If some food claims to be sugar free, you can have the reasonable expectation that it and base your decision on that. It should be the same with HTML. If some site claims to conform to HTML X.Y it should do so. And that claim should be enforceable. It is still up to the individual to use a site or not, but it should be illegal to advertise site features (such as compliance) that your site does not have.
We've actually considered doing full vac. analyze ... This means several of these large tables have a large portion of the rows updated.
Don't VACUUM these tables, but CLUSTER them. VACUUM does in-place reordering while CLUSTER simply rebuilds the entire table and indexes and then swaps the pointers to the filenodes. If you combine that with a high value of maintenance_work_mem it can lead to a massive speedup.
Yes there is. As defined in ISO/IEC 9075-11:2003 you can use:
SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES
This currently works in at least MS SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Mimer SQL. This is not an omission in the SQL standard, only in certain implementations. Whine at the vendor of those implementations if you want that to change.
There is a common language for stored procedures / triggers. SQL Persistent Stored Modules (SQL/PSM) is defined in ISO/IEC 9075-4:2003 and is currently implemented by at least IBM DB2, MySQL 5 and Mimer SQL. An implementation effort for PostgreSQL / EnterpriseDB is under way.
If your database does not support SQL/PSM and is not working on implementing it you have only your choice of database to blame for that.
We invented the type of government where the people are represented by representatives in a legislative body, separate from an executive branch, commonly known as the Republic. Your use of the aforementioned type of government infringes on our Intellectual Property rights. Please cease to use the aforementioned type of government within 30 days.
Best regards,
The Old World
and build it -- we paid for it.
The internet is, by definition, the sum of its constituing networks. The constituing networks are build and paid by their respective owners. Basic property rights. You don't own anything you can't show the receipt for.
In the case of the domain name system, that is payed for by the owners of domain names. Year after year they pay for it through their registrars.
That doesn't entitle us to something?
Other then whining on/.? No.
You want more examples? Graham Bell invented the phone. Does that mean the US has the final say in deciding whether Moldavia gets country prefix 0418 or 0418? No, that is decided by the ITU, which is a special organization of the UN. (Which are known to be anti-American communists, having done such terrible things as providing North America with the obscenely long country code "1" just to make it harder for the rest of the world to call the US.)
Installation\maintenance:
MySQL > PostgreSQL; MySQL is easier to set up
You might want to check out this lengthy review of the installation of PostgreSQL, MySQL and Oracle on Windows that has a winner that may be a bit surprising to those that have not been keeping tabs on what has been happening recently.
You mean the Data Execute Protection from Microsoft? OpenBSD has had that for a long time already, only they named it w^x.
This new feature from OpenBSD is the use of guard pages and the immediate freeing of memory. In essence this means that both bad programming and exploit attempts are much more likely to result in a core dump then some unidentifiable and non reproducible corruption or a working exploit. Many people consider that a good thing because it will result in bugs being found in userland applications that would have otherwise stayed unnoticed. So even if you don't use OpenBSD yourself this is helping your system becomming more secure and better. And if you are running OpenBSD there is o need to worry too much about the stability of this feature, it was actually enabled shortly after the 3.7 release and has been in every snapshot on the way to 3.8.
And I have to agree with the author that the best thing is that we get all the goods without ever having to switch them on!
It's a shame you can't sue MSFT when a worm works it's way across the net costing Billions to clean up after
I am not so certain you can't sue them. Is it their fault that some kiddy with too much time on his hands wrote yet another worm? Have they been negligent in developing unsafe software?
If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you have reason to go to court in most Western countries. Consumer protection really goes that far and law trumps contract and overrules the EULA. The reason nobody does it is that for a consumer it just isn't worthwhile, not because it is impossible. (And those businesses that can get enough out of a lawsuit to reclaim their legal expenses don't enjoy consumer protection.)
And if you did not answer "yes" to any of these questions, then why is it a shame?
I saw one guy in WIRED magazine say the amount of electrical power required to convert water to hydrogen to move a car 300 miles is measured in MEGAWATTS.
MW is a unit of power. You need to multiply that with time to get energy.
Taking a leap, I would guess that he meant megawatt-hour instead of megawatt. To put that claim into perspective, the energy density of gasoline is 12 MWh/kg. How much gasoline would such a 300 mile trip take and how much MWh is that?
Source code quality is not easy to compare. At a first glance, MySQL is doing very good. They have this nice blurb about only having 1 defect in 4000 lines being more then 4 times better then with most commercial software. But if you dig deeper, you notice that PostgreSQL has been tested by the same company and only had 1 defect in every 39000 lines of code. Wow, so PostgreSQL must really be a lot better then MySQL.
But if you dig even deeper, you will find some explanation from a PostgreSQL developer and you remember what your mother told you about lies, damned lies and statistics.
You want to know about source code quality? Go read the source.
This is in response to a tragedy where a mother killed 2 of her children. As an investigation showed afterwards, neighbours, the school, the general practiciner and even the police had all in the past warned Child Protection Services that there was something wrong with that family. All of these warnings individually where not enough for them to do something about it. Had somebody had the ability to see all these warnings together, that tragedy might have been prevented.
Judging from the text of the article, the system appears to be designed as a minimal implementation of a record keeping system to prevent this from happening in the future. The parties that commonly warn Child Protection Services (schools, police, GPs) get to set flags, and if too many independent flags show up it is investigated, even when individual flags are not enough for an investigation.
I have to disagree with MySQL being the natural choice. With both MySQL and the drivers being GPL a vendor of POS applications would either have to GPL his POS application, or pay for a commercial license for each sold unit. Neither appear to be particularly attractive.
XA support has been committed into the upcomming PostgreSQL release and is already supported by Firebird. Considering their licensing, both are better choices.
Say what you want about sloppy developers developing sloppy applications for a sloppy OS and crappy users, but there is some thruth in it.
Why is it that the PostgreSQL developers can make a program that not only works perfectly without Administrator Privileges, but outright refuses to start under any account that has Administrator Privileges? (If you want to start a non-service PostgreSQL while logged in as Administrator you actually have to use runas to start it under a normal account.) It is because they brought their Unix mindset to the Windows platform and didn't buckle when people called it inconvenient. They did the right thing, and instead of removing the restriction they wrote a better that takes care of creating an account for you.
Why can't a lame ass game or crappy financial software run as a normal user, when a complete DBMS can? Because the developers don't care, and lusers continue to buy junk.
At least in the EU the legal issues are very clearly spelled out in the E-commerce Directive.
Article 12
"Mere conduit"
1. Where an information society service is provided that consists of the transmission in a communication network of information provided by a recipient of the service, or the provision of access to a communication network, Member States shall ensure that the service provider is not liable for the information transmitted, on condition that the provider:
(a) does not initiate the transmission;
(b) does not select the receiver of the transmission; and
(c) does not select or modify the information contained in the transmission.
[..]
Use of the provided service for purposes that may not conform to your own standards are an inevitable risk of providing any service whatsoever. It is exactly the same risk with operating a telecommunications network or even a road: some child molester might use that road. Is that a reason not to build any roads anymore?
PostgreSQL not backed by a commercial group? You must be kidding. Just look at the Developer Bios page to see which companies back PostgreSQL. The core committee is employed by 6 different companies and if you look further down you will see many more. And several large contributors to the project, like Pervasive and Fujitsu which employ several full-time hackers and a support staff, aren't even in the list there.
PostgreSQL is not backed by a single commercial group, it is backed by many commercial groups. It is doing just fine that way, and will continue to do fine even if one off those backers goes belly up. That has happened before, that will happen again and exactly because there is no single controlling commercial interest group that does hardly affect the PostgreSQL development.
Performance is still an issue when you don't read the manual and never perform maintenance on your database. No matter how good the planner is, if it doesn't have acurate statistics because nobody ever runs ANAYZE your database will crawl. No matter which version you use, if you never VACUUM dead row versions will accumulate and eventually kill your performance.
I use PostgreSQL on a daily basis and when I change a database schema I will make sure that I run a VACUUM ANALYZE after committing the changes. But many of the people that we host don't bother to read the manual and don't do this. Usually this is no big deal because it gets picked up by the scheduled jobs. But every now and then somebody calls in a panic because their website is slow. And it always turns out to be major schema changes throwing the planner off. A quick VACUUM ANALYZE gets the performance up again and the customer is happy and has (hopefully) learned a valuable lesson.
This is a real gotcha in PostgreSQL. It has made a few of our customers' websites crawl for a few hours on occasion. But it has never caused dataloss.
Hot installation was an explicit design goal of Slony-1.
You have to compile Slony-1 for which the sourcecode from PostgreSQL needs to be present on the system you are compiling on. After that, you log in to your database and run a SQL script to tell the database where the compiled code is. That is it, no restarts, no switching of the PostgreSQL binary required.
This dynamic adding of extensions is one of the standard features of PostgreSQL and is used for many extensions. For instance, all the stored procedure languages (pl/pgsql, pl/R, pl/PHP, pl/Perl etc.) can be added this way, as do large features such as PostGIS.
Most of your first request is already implemented in PostgreSQL 8. You can combine a hot backup of the files on the filesystem with the WAL-archiver to have the backup feature you want. It is not per tablespace (yet) so you have to backup your entire database.
For the second request, keep a close eye on the mailinglists. Affilias has hired a core developer to make it happen. The first stage, master-slave replication, has been released in the form of Slony-1. Yes, it is an add on. No, it is not integrated. But you can add Slony-1 to a running system and add slaves without ever taking the master down, and it is backwards compatible so you can even use it to upgrade running 7.3.x installations to PostgreSQL 8. The second stage, Slony-2, will be a full multi-master replication solution. (I read something about a 'kickoff' meeting today hosted by Affilias.) The goal is to be able to take a single, out of the box installation of PostgreSQL, plug Slony-1 into it, replicate the database to another box and when that box has caught up switch to full multi-master mode under Slony-2. The code won't fall out of the sky tomorrow, but people are working on it.
I would consider the PostgreSQL gotchas to be of an entirely different category as the MySQL gotchas. In PostgreSQL the gotchas are all about performance. And while it may be bad that the database crawls if I didn't schedule a job with vacuum and analyze, that does not have any long term effects. I just run the maintenance tasks manually, add them to a cronjob and I am good to go. In MySQL however, the gotchas are mostly about data integrity. And that means that they can be disasterous because they can lead to dataloss. Unless you can explain to me how to get back whatever was silently truncated by MySQL if I discover the problems a few days later.
I do very much prefer PostgreSQLs focus on data integrity. But of course I actually read the manual so I won't be bitten by them in either database.
Take a decent benchmark, run it with 10 instances simultaneously and then we'll see if it really helps for heavy multithreaded loads. (That doesn't really belong in a desktop test, but does compiling?)
The most expensive task of a database is I/O. If you have a transaction that alters data in 3 places in two tables and that transaction commits, the database has to wait until the data has hit the disk. (Data hitting the disk is the Durability part from ACID.) With an average disk latency of 7 miliseconds doing 6 I/O operations translates to 42 miliseconds waiting before the database can confirm the commit to the client.
Since this is way to long, these 6 writes are pushed out to the buffers in RAM, but writing of these changes to disk is not required. Instead, all six changes are sequentially written to a special file, the Write Ahead Log, and that log file hitting the disk is sufficient to guarantee durability. That is only 1 I/O operation, a significant win in performance.
Obviously at some point the buffers have to be written to disk anyway. This happens when they are so inactive that they drop out of cache the normal way. But to know that all changes to a file have been pushed out to disk, which we need to know for certain before we can recycle the WAL, files are occasionally forced to disk. This forcing to disk is called a checkpoint, and it happens every X seconds, when there has been a certain amount of activity or when a superuser issues the CHECKPOINT command.
The code examples you provided are a way of creating a SAVEPOINT, a point inside a transaction that you can roll back to without having to roll back to the beginning and restarting everything. The prefered syntax is:
BEGIN TRANSACTION;
SELECT foo FROM bar;
SAVEPOINT selectOK;
INSERT INTO bar (foo) VALUES (1); -- duplicate error, roll back to savepoint
ROLLBACK TO selectOK;
UPDATE bar SET foo = foo + 1 WHERE xyz;
COMMIT;
Slashdot Mirror
Looking through the list I wonder how many of these patents have been contested and/or how many of these patent applications should be rejected. For instance, under the "Web Browser Federated Sign-On Protocol" Microsoft lists patent applications 2005-0223217-A1 and 2006-0112422-A1. There exists prior art for 2005-0223217-A1 claim 14 and further in A-Select and I think for the rest of the claims in Shibboleth. I would have to study 2006-0112422-A1 more in detail, but it looks like about half of the claims there also have prior art in those systems.
They use
This currently works in at least MS SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Mimer SQL. This is not an omission in the SQL standard, only in certain implementations. Whine at the vendor of those implementations if you want that to change.
There is a common language for stored procedures / triggers. SQL Persistent Stored Modules (SQL/PSM) is defined in ISO/IEC 9075-4:2003 and is currently implemented by at least IBM DB2, MySQL 5 and Mimer SQL. An implementation effort for PostgreSQL / EnterpriseDB is under way.
If your database does not support SQL/PSM and is not working on implementing it you have only your choice of database to blame for that.
We invented the type of government where the people are represented by representatives in a legislative body, separate from an executive branch, commonly known as the Republic. Your use of the aforementioned type of government infringes on our Intellectual Property rights. Please cease to use the aforementioned type of government within 30 days.
Best regards,
The Old World The internet is, by definition, the sum of its constituing networks. The constituing networks are build and paid by their respective owners. Basic property rights. You don't own anything you can't show the receipt for.
In the case of the domain name system, that is payed for by the owners of domain names. Year after year they pay for it through their registrars. Other then whining on
You want more examples? Graham Bell invented the phone. Does that mean the US has the final say in deciding whether Moldavia gets country prefix 0418 or 0418? No, that is decided by the ITU, which is a special organization of the UN. (Which are known to be anti-American communists, having done such terrible things as providing North America with the obscenely long country code "1" just to make it harder for the rest of the world to call the US.)
You mean the Data Execute Protection from Microsoft? OpenBSD has had that for a long time already, only they named it w^x.
This new feature from OpenBSD is the use of guard pages and the immediate freeing of memory. In essence this means that both bad programming and exploit attempts are much more likely to result in a core dump then some unidentifiable and non reproducible corruption or a working exploit. Many people consider that a good thing because it will result in bugs being found in userland applications that would have otherwise stayed unnoticed. So even if you don't use OpenBSD yourself this is helping your system becomming more secure and better. And if you are running OpenBSD there is o need to worry too much about the stability of this feature, it was actually enabled shortly after the 3.7 release and has been in every snapshot on the way to 3.8.
And I have to agree with the author that the best thing is that we get all the goods without ever having to switch them on!
If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you have reason to go to court in most Western countries. Consumer protection really goes that far and law trumps contract and overrules the EULA. The reason nobody does it is that for a consumer it just isn't worthwhile, not because it is impossible. (And those businesses that can get enough out of a lawsuit to reclaim their legal expenses don't enjoy consumer protection.)
And if you did not answer "yes" to any of these questions, then why is it a shame?
Taking a leap, I would guess that he meant megawatt-hour instead of megawatt. To put that claim into perspective, the energy density of gasoline is 12 MWh/kg. How much gasoline would such a 300 mile trip take and how much MWh is that?
How do you want it to compare?
Source code quality is not easy to compare. At a first glance, MySQL is doing very good. They have this nice blurb about only having 1 defect in 4000 lines being more then 4 times better then with most commercial software. But if you dig deeper, you notice that PostgreSQL has been tested by the same company and only had 1 defect in every 39000 lines of code. Wow, so PostgreSQL must really be a lot better then MySQL.
But if you dig even deeper, you will find some explanation from a PostgreSQL developer and you remember what your mother told you about lies, damned lies and statistics.
You want to know about source code quality? Go read the source.
Provisional results have been posted in the media section of the offical World Solar Challenge site.
This is in response to a tragedy where a mother killed 2 of her children. As an investigation showed afterwards, neighbours, the school, the general practiciner and even the police had all in the past warned Child Protection Services that there was something wrong with that family. All of these warnings individually where not enough for them to do something about it. Had somebody had the ability to see all these warnings together, that tragedy might have been prevented.
Judging from the text of the article, the system appears to be designed as a minimal implementation of a record keeping system to prevent this from happening in the future. The parties that commonly warn Child Protection Services (schools, police, GPs) get to set flags, and if too many independent flags show up it is investigated, even when individual flags are not enough for an investigation.
I have to disagree with MySQL being the natural choice. With both MySQL and the drivers being GPL a vendor of POS applications would either have to GPL his POS application, or pay for a commercial license for each sold unit. Neither appear to be particularly attractive.
XA support has been committed into the upcomming PostgreSQL release and is already supported by Firebird. Considering their licensing, both are better choices.
When they raided last year in Operation Fastlink I saw some significant changes in traffic patterns. This time, I am not seeing anything.
Say what you want about sloppy developers developing sloppy applications for a sloppy OS and crappy users, but there is some thruth in it.
Why is it that the PostgreSQL developers can make a program that not only works perfectly without Administrator Privileges, but outright refuses to start under any account that has Administrator Privileges? (If you want to start a non-service PostgreSQL while logged in as Administrator you actually have to use runas to start it under a normal account.) It is because they brought their Unix mindset to the Windows platform and didn't buckle when people called it inconvenient. They did the right thing, and instead of removing the restriction they wrote a better that takes care of creating an account for you.
Why can't a lame ass game or crappy financial software run as a normal user, when a complete DBMS can? Because the developers don't care, and lusers continue to buy junk.
PostgreSQL not backed by a commercial group? You must be kidding. Just look at the Developer Bios page to see which companies back PostgreSQL. The core committee is employed by 6 different companies and if you look further down you will see many more. And several large contributors to the project, like Pervasive and Fujitsu which employ several full-time hackers and a support staff, aren't even in the list there.
PostgreSQL is not backed by a single commercial group, it is backed by many commercial groups. It is doing just fine that way, and will continue to do fine even if one off those backers goes belly up. That has happened before, that will happen again and exactly because there is no single controlling commercial interest group that does hardly affect the PostgreSQL development.
Performance is still an issue when you don't read the manual and never perform maintenance on your database. No matter how good the planner is, if it doesn't have acurate statistics because nobody ever runs ANAYZE your database will crawl. No matter which version you use, if you never VACUUM dead row versions will accumulate and eventually kill your performance.
I use PostgreSQL on a daily basis and when I change a database schema I will make sure that I run a VACUUM ANALYZE after committing the changes. But many of the people that we host don't bother to read the manual and don't do this. Usually this is no big deal because it gets picked up by the scheduled jobs. But every now and then somebody calls in a panic because their website is slow. And it always turns out to be major schema changes throwing the planner off. A quick VACUUM ANALYZE gets the performance up again and the customer is happy and has (hopefully) learned a valuable lesson.
This is a real gotcha in PostgreSQL. It has made a few of our customers' websites crawl for a few hours on occasion. But it has never caused dataloss.
Hot installation was an explicit design goal of Slony-1.
You have to compile Slony-1 for which the sourcecode from PostgreSQL needs to be present on the system you are compiling on. After that, you log in to your database and run a SQL script to tell the database where the compiled code is. That is it, no restarts, no switching of the PostgreSQL binary required.
This dynamic adding of extensions is one of the standard features of PostgreSQL and is used for many extensions. For instance, all the stored procedure languages (pl/pgsql, pl/R, pl/PHP, pl/Perl etc.) can be added this way, as do large features such as PostGIS.
Most of your first request is already implemented in PostgreSQL 8. You can combine a hot backup of the files on the filesystem with the WAL-archiver to have the backup feature you want. It is not per tablespace (yet) so you have to backup your entire database.
For the second request, keep a close eye on the mailinglists. Affilias has hired a core developer to make it happen.
The first stage, master-slave replication, has been released in the form of Slony-1. Yes, it is an add on. No, it is not integrated. But you can add Slony-1 to a running system and add slaves without ever taking the master down, and it is backwards compatible so you can even use it to upgrade running 7.3.x installations to PostgreSQL 8.
The second stage, Slony-2, will be a full multi-master replication solution. (I read something about a 'kickoff' meeting today hosted by Affilias.) The goal is to be able to take a single, out of the box installation of PostgreSQL, plug Slony-1 into it, replicate the database to another box and when that box has caught up switch to full multi-master mode under Slony-2.
The code won't fall out of the sky tomorrow, but people are working on it.
I would consider the PostgreSQL gotchas to be of an entirely different category as the MySQL gotchas.
In PostgreSQL the gotchas are all about performance. And while it may be bad that the database crawls if I didn't schedule a job with vacuum and analyze, that does not have any long term effects. I just run the maintenance tasks manually, add them to a cronjob and I am good to go.
In MySQL however, the gotchas are mostly about data integrity. And that means that they can be disasterous because they can lead to dataloss. Unless you can explain to me how to get back whatever was silently truncated by MySQL if I discover the problems a few days later.
I do very much prefer PostgreSQLs focus on data integrity. But of course I actually read the manual so I won't be bitten by them in either database.
I suppose that depends on your tests. How much attention should we pay to the databse test if the review says:
.
We expect to see a performance increase with HyperThreading - SQL servers must thread well.
Yet the sql-bench manual says:
Note that this benchmark is single-threaded
Take a decent benchmark, run it with 10 instances simultaneously and then we'll see if it really helps for heavy multithreaded loads. (That doesn't really belong in a desktop test, but does compiling?)
You are confusing checkpoints with savepoints.
The most expensive task of a database is I/O. If you have a transaction that alters data in 3 places in two tables and that transaction commits, the database has to wait until the data has hit the disk. (Data hitting the disk is the Durability part from ACID.) With an average disk latency of 7 miliseconds doing 6 I/O operations translates to 42 miliseconds waiting before the database can confirm the commit to the client.
Since this is way to long, these 6 writes are pushed out to the buffers in RAM, but writing of these changes to disk is not required. Instead, all six changes are sequentially written to a special file, the Write Ahead Log, and that log file hitting the disk is sufficient to guarantee durability. That is only 1 I/O operation, a significant win in performance.
Obviously at some point the buffers have to be written to disk anyway. This happens when they are so inactive that they drop out of cache the normal way. But to know that all changes to a file have been pushed out to disk, which we need to know for certain before we can recycle the WAL, files are occasionally forced to disk. This forcing to disk is called a checkpoint, and it happens every X seconds, when there has been a certain amount of activity or when a superuser issues the CHECKPOINT command.
The code examples you provided are a way of creating a SAVEPOINT, a point inside a transaction that you can roll back to without having to roll back to the beginning and restarting everything. The prefered syntax is:
BEGIN TRANSACTION;
SELECT foo FROM bar;
SAVEPOINT selectOK;
INSERT INTO bar (foo) VALUES (1); -- duplicate error, roll back to savepoint
ROLLBACK TO selectOK;
UPDATE bar SET foo = foo + 1 WHERE xyz;
COMMIT;